The wise beekeeper does not wear dark clothing, lest it pick up light-colored pollen. Italian bees are gentler and more chic than the Austrian variety. The mating box, capping fork and spur-wheel embedder are essential tools for apiculture. And all power in the beehive rests with a treacherous but fragrant bitch.
All this bee talk crops up in The Castle in the Forest, Norman Mailer's zzzzz-filled new novel about Adolf Hitler's tender, metaphor-fraught and (in this book's view) literally bedeviled boyhood. So it is not a stretch for the book's jacket copy to insist that "now, on the eve of his 84th birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before." More about beekeeping — absolutely.
Seldom is the banality of evil made this literal. In his first novel in a decade, Mailer has undertaken the ostensibly tough job of explaining Hitler's origins, then narrowed his attention to the nuts and bolts (talk about Freudian! And this book loves exclamation points!) of fractious family life.
He spies on the Hitler household by inserting a pantingly nosy narrator who poses as a Nazi intelligence officer but claims to have been sent by the devil. This observer, stiff and Viagran in prose style, is always eager to witness "the most agreeable work of all — that hard-breathing, feverish meat-heavy run up the hills of physical joy."
Part demon, part actuary (or so it sounds when he speaks of his clients and budget), this narrator painstakingly analyzes Adolf Hitler's origins. He examines the implications of a doubly incestuous bloodline (which is not new speculation and is knottily complicated: It makes Adolf "a First-Degree Incestuary One Step Removed.") He leaves no stage of toilet-training unplumbed, finding much to work with in "excretory dramas."
As he puts it: "As a devil, I am obliged to live intimately with excrement in all its forms, physical and mental. I know the emotional waste of ugly and disappointing events, the sour indwelling poison of unjust punishment, the corrosion of impotent thoughts, and, of course, I also have to engage caca itself."
The narrator goes on to suggest (cue the bees) that young Adolf adapted the cruelty of the insect world to suit his own purposes and developed an iron will to thwart Alois Hitler, his overbearing father. For all the long-winded, claustrophobic intensity with which The Castle and the Forest dissects these matters, its conclusions turn out to have caca's sublety. With 467 pages of repetitive text, this is a big book with a jarring incongruity: Its thinking is so small.
Long, monstrous story short: According to The Castle in the Forest, all the elements of classic Freudian character development were present during Adolf Hitler's formative years. There were also certain kinks that made Hitler special. (Mailer loves these best.) By the time the novel leaves him, Hitler has been taught that some creatures must be extinguished so that others can survive, and that a terrified dog will still love its master. And his sister has told him that he "just may not be a very good person."
Little of this speculation is unexpected, despite the huge amounts of research implied by a lengthy bibliography. Freud, Jung, Milton, Wagner, Nietzsche and "Anna Karenina" all helped Mailer conclude that Hitler's love (Mother) and hate (Father) relationships kindled his sympathy for the devil. Although The Castle in the Forest does not bother with a discography, its built-in soundtrack blasts the Rolling Stones.
But this book is not strictly a character study. "It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography, since it is as privileged as a novel," the narrator explains, thus offering some idea of where its problems lie. In any case Mailer's casual insights are far sharper than his important ones. The weight of preparation might have numbed him, but the inherent ironies of The Castle in the Forest (with a title that turns out to be slyly ambiguous) can still bring out his gleeful side.
Sometimes Mailer can hammer home the obvious ("Alois saw bees as living a life with parallels to his own") while still seeming to wink about his own heavy-handedness. At least it's best to hope that is what he's doing. To read a sentence like "she sensed that the greatest provocation to her husband would be to comment on his pipe" is to imagine a writer's cleverly pretending not to be clever — and doing it with quite a bit of success.
When the narrator promises to spare the reader a description of a dinner that he then goes on to describe, the same kind of gamesmanship seems to be at play. Unfortunately, when Mailer suggests that the reader can skip a long foray into the Russia of Czar Nicholas II, he turns out to be giving good advice.
Tricky or not, The Castle in the Forest has Mailer's unmistakable hallmarks. They are hallmarks that, as The Naked and the Dead (1948) approaches a major anniversary, have been unmistakable for 60 years. The new book is lascivious, grandiose, cosmically critical (finding something Teutonic in technology and touting it as the Devil's own handiwork) and cantankerous, filled with grandstanding pronouncements on the nature of evil. About religious extremism, he writes: "We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction."
The mass murderer Adolf Hitler is a child called "Adi" in this book. His menace comes alive only by implication. But his father, Alois Hitler, is true to his own father's "tradition of apocalyptic intercourse in barn straw." His nature is as dangerous as his son's, but with one great difference: Alois is intoxicated by women. About Alois' connoisseurship of female anatomy, Mailer writes: "This was as close as Alois ever came to admiring the Creator."
Beleaguered, despotic, aggrieved, boastfully sensual and always ready to pontificate, Alois is yet another version of the devil Mailer knows.
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